Algora | Algora TV

Novu.co Founder Interview Highlights

Algora

Watching now

00:00 In Israel, we work from Sunday till Thursday.

00:02 So for us, it's like a start of week now,

00:04 but the weekend was good.

00:07 Entrepreneurship and building stuff

00:08 and breaking stuff for the past 10 years.

00:10 Novo is my third company

00:12 together with my co-founder, Tomer.

00:14 Novo started in our second company.

00:16 We've been building a recreational sports marketplace

00:19 and yet another time we had to build,

00:21 you know, a notification in front of the product.

00:25 And then I remember like Tomer and I in in the office late night and then like what if you know this

00:30 could be a standalone you know service and a product and people can consume it as a service

00:35 we've done a lot of user interviews uh back in the time i think more than hundreds like with

00:40 local israeli companies big small enterprise, you know, trying to understand

00:46 what people are doing. Like, are they, already there is a product on the shelf, they're building

00:50 it in-house, what's going on with there? And the first POC we actually built for Novo was

00:55 not open source. It was dedicated for product people as a persona. It was quite a different

01:02 product. We're selling No novo twice once uh from the product

01:07 and then the product kind of hands us over to the engineer and the conversation was not easy because

01:13 the engineers they were like yeah we can build this alone like we don't need you know like a

01:17 closed product and like we didn't frame novo correctly to them it was like you know they

01:22 they're very defensive like yeah we yeah, we will build this.

01:26 You cannot like, we cannot integrate this and et cetera.

01:28 And this is basically when we had to pivot, like we understand, like after a few of

01:32 those, we're doing something wrong.

01:33 You know, we are both in the open source community for quite a while.

01:37 We have a few open source libraries that we kind of created back then and like

01:42 really enjoyed the whole motion of it.

01:44 And then they said like hey why

01:46 won't we try you know something um and to see if like engineers get it you know the first version

01:52 of novo on open source was an ojs library with 25 lines of code basically it's a it was a very

01:59 a very simple stateless library that all we've done is like we said okay there are three tiers

02:04 to notifications there is the delivery provider there is the message content of the notifications

02:08 and there is the actually trigger that triggers the notification and all of them are decoupled

02:13 from each other and you can switch you know the different phases of it didn't do anything

02:17 specific we just send it to a few whatsapp groups of friends and etc but there was no really traction out of it and after a while we spoke with

02:28 tomor and like okay we see this is like getting some traction but it's nothing substantial maybe

02:34 we will share you know our uh vision about what we want novo to be not what it is today you know

02:41 like the whole api based kind of dealing with time zones,

02:45 user preferences, like embeddable notification, like really whatever we thought Novo could

02:49 be one day.

02:50 And we got a DevTool.

02:52 We wrote like this blog post on DevTool about like, yeah, building the first open source

02:56 notification infrastructure.

02:57 Okay, like let's put it out there.

02:59 Like whatever happens, happens.

03:01 And, you know, kind of, we just wanted to see if developers get what we're doing like are the right target persona i remember it was in a friend's wedding and then suddenly

03:09 like i'm i'm checking out on github and people like joining discord and you know writing github

03:14 issues and so i said tomer something is going on like there is quite unusual amount of traffic to

03:19 novo and then i went to google analytics and then like I'm seeing like, you know, hundreds of concurrent, you know, visits.

03:27 And also on GitHub, like it's exploding, people entering Discord, like what's going on there?

03:32 And we asked a few folks and they're like, hey, Google picked you up and like trending posts, you know, on their Google feed, like on the mobile apps.

03:40 And we had so much traffic during that weekend.

03:44 And from there, it all kind of exploded.

03:46 So after the initial traction, what happened is that we got inbound basically from a few

03:54 VC funds in the US and European ecosystems.

03:59 And apparently we didn't realize that, but they are monitoring a lot, the open source

04:03 kind of ecosystem and, you know, they're rising and like based on some vanity metrics like stars and etc organized one month

04:09 of fundraising process where we basically aligned everyone into the same timeline of okay we have

04:17 the first two weeks and then like we try to control you know the the whole dynamics of the round to make sure that we get on top of it uh

04:25 on one hand we get the best uh uh uh results we have and we've like we've done like crazy you know

04:33 from seven in the morning until like 2 a.m at night like in the office speaking with us funds

04:39 you know like all the times on differences um and in the end like we i think we spoke with over 100 vcs in in that month uh so

04:48 the pipeline was quite high and the importance was having this pipeline you know managed by us

04:53 and not managed by them so we know like okay you got until next week to move to the next step

04:58 otherwise sorry like we don't want to waste time on this so like this is the technicalities of you know around but

05:05 yeah and and basically after that we closed our uh seed funding in uh january basically of

05:12 last year and since then you know building the company hiring the first crazy people to join us

05:22 and we can chat about it and in a second like

05:25 because it's a strange thing you know you reach out to somebody from the internet

05:29 from the open source community and like hey leave your job and come to work with us like somebody

05:34 that never met us if he searches about a notifier back then there is nothing on the internet you

05:40 know it's like i the first people came to know who i am like i really appreciate

05:45 them because they made like a crazy move i i'm not sure if i would done it you know

05:49 if i was in their shoes but these are the first crazy employees uh that joined us were those were

05:56 those did they already contribute or did you know them or spotted them online and what did they look

06:01 like yeah so a combination uh we had a few of the open

06:05 source contributors we had david was the first one kind of that was really excited about the project

06:11 uh prior to anything like from the small lib we had uh and really got in touch and one day he calls

06:18 me like on discord and says hey dima i have this crazy idea let's take this you know uh um you know

06:24 the 20 line library we have and let's create

06:26 you know a service for it an api and like okay there we come you got it you got it it was

06:34 important for us you know up front with the community to say hey we are also a business

06:39 you know we need to sustain ourselves somehow to to keep kind of supporting the open source motion

06:44 we have we released it quite early on and with the cloud service, you know, it's quite straightforward.

06:48 Like we don't reinvent the wheel.

06:49 There is like a usage-based kind of classical pricing.

06:53 And on the other hand, we have the enterprise motion of, you know, the on-prem managed services

06:57 that we provide for them.

06:59 And this is more of the enterprise kind of sales motion.

07:03 Is there something additional that could be said about your choice to introduce the cloud

07:06 version early on? I personally like that. I'm just curious for other people in this

07:10 position and thinking about that. Does it help with anything additional, for instance,

07:16 analytics and seeing how people use your product? Is there some other considerations?

07:21 Yeah, exactly. 100%. This is one of the things like understanding usage

07:26 like we did see in you know a lot of interest from the open source community to share feedback

07:31 nonetheless even like when we don't have you know the classical analytics available but still being

07:36 able to see and monitor and experiment and it's a huge difference in my opinion and there is a lot

07:42 of folks doing also analytics on the you know self-hosted kind

07:46 of editions and also on the like you can opt in for like sharing some aggregated analytics to help

07:52 you know improving the product but with the cloud it's like it's very dynamic for us we can deploy

07:57 version see like the experiment how it goes um and also you know, because we do believe there is a thing like to have Novo,

08:07 you know, being able to scale for like a huge amount of events and notification.

08:12 There's a lot of moving parts and our vision was, you know, register, get an API key.

08:17 And like, we, we take it care for you.

08:19 You cannot force, uh, to build a community.

08:24 You cannot force it too much you know it's like if you imagine it

08:27 like a garden you know with vegetables and and flowers or whatever you cannot force it to grow

08:34 you know 10x faster just because you do like you know something you can provide it you know the

08:40 best environment possible you can provide it the best nutrients possible but you need to give it time and you it's kind of taking on by itself and creating this diversity of different

08:50 people different cultures different ideas and like providing a good environment for it and you just

08:56 need to let the time you know it's like you cannot force some things in life it's a time investment

08:59 this is a decision you need to make like okay do i want to invest in this or not i think the main

09:03 kind of thesis of you need to kind of give it the right environment and nurture you know the people and

09:09 like the people that coming in and give them place and give them you know ability to express

09:14 themselves and and feel part of it basically the first type of contributors and this is the

09:19 also the early adapters we had in the communities this is the folks that you know have built this previously

09:25 in their companies and they like they really connected to the pain and like they see you know

09:30 how it can help them and etc and they're really excited from the very beginning to participate

09:35 and help uh this is the one kind of type of people uh the other ones is just people who want to learn

09:41 you know they are maybe new to the tech industry and novo is you know we have uh

09:46 kind of it's uh for a full stack developer you know we have the front end and we react we have

09:52 the back end with node and like using mongodb and like you have a real kind of life you know

09:57 application that you can learn from how it works how it operates and and how do you work in a team

10:02 environment without like pull requests so we

10:05 had also a few folks that just you know might not be experienced with what novo trying to do but

10:11 they want to learn and and it's a great place and for example my my little brother nikita he wants

10:18 to get into tech as well and he's done a few studies and courses you know in in in front end

10:23 and back end and he was like hey i and he just went

10:26 and started to contribute you know also to novo because for him it's like you learn some stuff

10:30 in theory but like how it looks like in a real world application you know with like big project

10:35 and etc folks that you know working using novo uh in their companies and they hey we need this

10:42 very strange sms provider that only operates in Singapore or whatever.

10:48 And then they can, instead of just sending a support ticket

10:51 and then hoping for the best, they can actually,

10:54 hey, maybe we're the only people in the world using this provider,

10:57 but we can actually integrate it into the product

11:00 because it's open source and we can see under the hood and contribute.

11:03 This is kind of the three main characters. If time time allows maybe hear a little bit about your music background

11:09 or some other lessons learned throughout your journey one of the important lessons you know

11:14 i've found is that people you know in everything in in a band in a company in a startup in a

11:22 whatever is the most important thing you you know, and it's like what

11:25 each person contributes. And with the band, we had, you know, amazing writer, lyrics writer,

11:33 marketing, you know, operational parts. And when you have kind of this collaboration and everybody

11:38 brings his own kind of thing to the table and specifically with founders, this is what I kind

11:43 of always recommend is that

11:45 having somebody that kind of completes you, you know, with a different skills,

11:49 skill set, but on the other hand, also sharing a lot of interest with you. So it's like,

11:54 it's not only, you know, opposites, but you also have some fun together and you can kind of

11:59 complete each other is also a great opportunity to build things in the open you know we we share our

12:05 handbook as a company also publicly available on notion and maybe we can also attach this later

12:12 being transparent i think for us is really one of our core values as a company with our notion

12:18 handbook and everything combined that kind of like i want to encourage people you know be open about

12:23 the stuff you're doing and people always you know like ask me yeah but why the competition can see what you're doing I'm like

12:29 I don't care you know as long as they're busy you know going after us you know and we are able to

12:35 kind of be in front and kind of learn and make it quicker we don't really care about those things

12:40 and you know it's for us we're just able to learn so much faster by doing so and i can only

12:46 recommend you know folks specifically in the open source world it's kind of you know hard to do it

12:52 without you know being transparent in a sense one of the biggest growth engines for us was being

12:57 transparent so i can only recommend that engineers you know in the world there is a big you know

13:04 audience of engineers i don't think is

13:06 it martin fuller i think once said that like the amount of engineers in the world i think it doubles

13:11 you know each i think three or four years or something like this um and engineers today they

13:17 are they have a lot of you know buying power basically they have a lot of influence i think

13:22 it's much easier for an engineer to see

13:25 you know what's going on under the hood of the product on the other hand to see the community

13:31 to being able to see okay like we can get support like they can evaluate it uh and and they are

13:37 mostly more you know they are willing to help like we we we see it right now we know a lot of

13:44 companies right now you, trying to be focused

13:46 on what they're doing.

13:47 You know, we don't want to reinvent the wheel as a company.

13:49 If we can get, you know, mixed panel or segment or plausible for analytics, I don't want to

13:54 build this in-house.

13:55 I don't want to maintain an email server when I have some grid or Twilio.

13:58 And prior to that, some cases companies were doing that, you know, it's like it was a common

14:03 thing.

14:03 Like you build your own email server, you your own analytics uh uh in front etc and today i think kind of

14:09 the competitiveness against other products forces you to focus on the core of the things you're

14:15 doing all the other things are you know you can either buy them or you can use them as an

14:19 off-the-shelf solution so you don't have to you know invest the very precious engineering time

14:24 into doing so and i think this opens a lot of opportunities it comes with a struggle you know

14:29 it's a lot of times it's not only fun and easy and it comes to monetization i think is one of

14:35 the hardest things you know you can be the most amazing open source product and you have

14:39 no commercial success you know out of it so you need to plan for it and you need to be smart about it.

14:46 There was more things to look at

14:48 and a lot of companies that had success

14:50 that done this similar path

14:52 and you can kind of understand,

14:54 okay, it can be done.

Library